Journalism dropout turned philosophy dropout, and that does a better job at defining me than the business degree I do have. I’m an amateur science fiction writer.
polymathwannabe
Karma: 3,865
Table salt produced in my native Colombia carries iodine by law. I suppose similar laws could be implemented elsewhere, like the addition of fluorine to U.S. tap water.
Hello everyone.
My name is Carlos. I’m 30 years old. I was born, and still live, in Colombia.
I excelled through elementary and high school until I crashed against the hard fact that my parents could not afford my college ambitions. At that time I cycled between wanting to study psychology, but also archaeology, but also chemistry, but also cinema. I wanted to know everything.
Then came a long, dark time while I crawled through the Business Management degree my parents made me go for. Worst years of my life, absolutely. But in the meantime, I devoted my spare time to my passion, and trained myself to become a better writer. I sort of freelanced for a local newspaper, then wrote some pieces for an online newspaper, and more recently won a national short story contest. I’m currently studying journalism and preparing a series of SF novels in Spanish.
The first spark of my rationalist tendencies came from one of the many books that were at my parents’ house. It told creation myths from the Native South Americans, and I found those stories much more engaging, beautiful and surprising than anything the book of Genesis had to offer. It was always clear to me that such stories should not be taken seriously; the next logical step was to give the same treatment to Genesis and everything that attempted to present a just-so explanation for the universe.
Right now I’m only a terribly amateurish rationalist. I wasted a good part of my youth pursuing a degree that was of no interest to me, and even if I made enormous efforts to better myself in the skills that did matter to me (namely as a writer), sometimes I still can’t go over the fact that most of my friends of my same age have already built successful careers pursuing their true passion in the time it took me to reverse my wrong path and begin walking my chosen one.
I won’t comment much here. In my everyday life, people can keep silent for hours hearing me talk, but here I see it’s obviously going to be different. I don’t have much to offer here. You guys are the next level above me. I’m here mostly to listen, and learn.
How would you go about building a Bayesian gaydar?
Thanks for the idea. I like the first version of your proposal better than the second, as it risks zero social penalty for wrong guesses.
I’m currently going through Eliezer’s long (“intuitive”) explanation of Bayes’ theorem (the one with the breast cancer and blue-eggs-with-pearls examples), and from what I was able to understand of it, we would need to find out:
Prior: how many of the total men are gay
Conditionals: how many gay men seem to be gay, and how many straight men seem to be gay
… to reach at the posterior (how many men who seem to be gay happen to be gay).
Your proposal sounds useful to solve both conditionals. I guess the main complication is that “to seem to be gay” is terribly difficult to define, and would require endless updates as your life goes through different societies, fads, subcultures, and age groups.
OK, I just ran some numbers based on wild guesses. Assuming 10% of all men are gay, and 80% of gay men look gay, and 15% of straight men look gay, my napkin calculation gives about 37% chance that a man who looks gay is actually gay.
Doesn’t look like any gaydar based on perceived behavior would be too reliable.
Of course, if any of my steps was wrong, please let me know.
Re “smart characters that win,” I recommend these from my random reading history:
The Pillars of the Earth and A World without Endby Ken Follett
River God by Wilbur Smith
Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
And as for specifically rationalist stories, you might want to check the Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman.
More exactly, the purpose of a weapon is to use pain to change behavior—which matches a general definition of “punishment.” Sometimes the mere threat of pain suffices to change behavior. In cases of mutual deterrence (or less drastic, like everyday border patrols) that’s the point: to make you behave differently from what you would otherwise, by appealing merely to your expectation of pain.
What I think places the atom bomb on its own category is that its potential for destruction is completely out of proportion with whatever tactical reason you may have for using it. Here we’re dealing with destruction on a civilization level. This is the first time in human history when the end of the world may come from our own hands. Nothing in our evolutionary past could have equipped us to deal with such a magnitude of danger. In the Middle Ages, the Pope was shocked at the implications of archery—you could kill from a distance, almost as effectively as with a sword, but without exposing yourself too much. He thought it was a dishonorable way of killing. By the time cannons were invented, everyone was more or less used to seeing archers in battle, but this time it was the capacity for devastation brought by cannons that was beyond anything previously experienced. Ditto for every increasing level of destructive power: machine guns, bomber airplanes, all the way up to the atom bomb. But the atom bomb is a gamechanger. No amount of animosity or vengefulness or spite can possibly justify vaporizing millions of human lives in an instant. Even if your target were a military citadel, the destruction will inevitably reach countless innocents that the post-WW2 international war protocols were designed to protect. Throwing the atom bomb is the Muggle equivalent of Avada Kedavra—there is no excuse that you can claim in your defense.
True, I should have used more general wording than “looks gay;” it would only be one component of the gaydar criteria. The problem is finding how to state it in not-loaded language. It would be impractical to use “matches stereotypically effeminate behavior.”
Another way our brains betray us
The United States was a latecomer in abolitionism.
Two words: King Asoka.
“How do we outsmart something designed to outsmart us?”
I don’t think the article suggests it’s literally impossible (some of the respondents passed the test), just terribly hard.
Indeed, wording is a problem. The first time I read about this fallacy (elsewhere on this website), it was between “A: Paul is a laywer AND plays the sax” and “B: Paul plays the sax.” I understood B as meaning that Paul’s job was as a musician, which I judged less likely than being a lawyer with a music hobby.
I have heard biologists speak of the “illusion of design,” that is, features that we all know developed naturally but reached so elegant a state that they make you feel they were made with a purpose in mind. The evolution of social attitudes and customs appears to follow a similar pattern, but it raises the question of why our society didn’t evolve to maximize happiness instead of maximizing oppression, which appears to have been the designer’s aim all along.
A Muggle Studies course
Some months ago, when I was preparing the first drafts of this course, I compiled a “recommended reading” list. What do you think?
http://estudiosmugglespluma.blogspot.com/p/lecturas-recomendadas.html
By coincidence I read this post today and, a few hours later, this news just in: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/the-benefits-of-cash-without-conditions/?_r=0